We visited the newly renovated Portland Public Library this past Fri. Was that ever an improvement! The new lobby is beautiful and the children's section is laid out very nicely. The heart of the library is still downstairs in the basement and sadly enough, I wasn't much impressed there. No new upgrades or additions to the book selection (I'm talkin' the most recent books are like from the 1990's...not great) and still the same old orange carpet and bad lighting. Oh well, I guess the upstairs sort of made up for the downstairs...sort of.
Of course we did manage to still carry away a pile of books. No issues there! I found 2 nice books on Henry David Thoreau that we've been enjoying. One is called Henry David Thoreau: A Man for our Time. The other one is called Into the Deep Forest and is about one of Thoreau's excursions into the Maine wilderness and his climb up Mt. Katahdin. The illustrations by Vermont artist, Kate Kiesler, are lovely, too.
I've been reading aloud This Country of Ours...a wonderful book that the grandparents gifted us with for Christmas. It's on the Ambleside Online book list...and it's fantastic! We're all greatly enjoying this one...and it still seems so relevant to our times today. Very relevant. The punctuation and some of the spelling is an absolute disaster in this particular edition, however. I must point that out to anyone wanting to have it for older children to read individually. In some places, it's taken me some real deciphering to figure out what in the world is the point. It's too bad...don't know who was responsible for the editing. But the storytelling itself is superb...and totally, TOTALLY worth the reading. It's a wonderful book on the history of our nation...far from boring or drab. The children beg me to read it every night!
